Our lockout statistics have been in high demand recently. With well-publicized stoppages in two national sports leagues serving as a backdrop, business writers in the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and the Huffington Post have featured our data to help gauge the prevalence of lockouts as a labor relations strategy. 2011, as I reported earlier as part of a New York Times article, was a record year for lockouts, in comparison to union strikes. How is 2012 shaping up?

Of the 116 total work stoppages that began in 2012 so far, seven have been lockouts. This may not sound like a lot, but historically, it’s huge. The 6.03 percent lockout rate is the sixth-highest since we started keeping track of work stoppages in 1990. And while it’s down considerably from last year’s high mark of 11.88 percent, it still continues a drastic upward swing in the use of lockouts.

In the 1990s and 2000s, lockouts accounted for 4.58 percent of all work stoppages. So far this decade, that rate has almost doubled, to 8.91 percent.

This is not to say that there aren’t more lockouts happening now than there were 20 years ago. In fact, the opposite is true: The 1990s saw an average of 22 lockouts per year. But that decade also saw an average of more than 520 strikes per year. That’s more in one year than we’ve seen so far this entire decade. But while the number of strikes being called by workers has plummeted over the years—in accordance with the national drop in union membership—the number of lockouts has decreased at a much slower pace.

To put it another way: the huge plunge in union membership over the past two decades has meant a huge plunge in union-initiated strikes. Yet it hasn’t meant a huge plunge in employer-initiated lockouts. That’s interesting. Newsworthy, even.

I’ve also found support in these figures for the claim that lockouts tend to last longer, and idle more workers, than strikes do. Stay tuned because I’ll address that in a future post.